Month: March 2019

Making Tax Digital (MTD) is part of the UK government’s plan to make the country’s tax system more efficient. It’s first stage comes into effect in April.

You only need to pay attention to MTD in 2019 if you are based in the UK, registered for VAT, and use Light Blue’s VAT return report. The scope of MTD will be widened in the future, but it’s very limited at the moment.

HMRC will require businesses to start submitting their VAT returns via compatible software from April 2019. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to use just one piece of software to manage your company’s finances: so long as you use “digital links” to transfer data between applications or to your accountant, MTD allows you to use a variety of tools. HMRC explicitly list CSV data exports and imports as an acceptable form of “digital link”, which means that Light Blue’s existing data export tools comply with MTD’s requirements.

If you’re already using Light Blue’s VAT return report, we will be in touch with you in the next few days to help you get ready for MTD. If you’re not using Light Blue’s VAT return report, you can probably carry on using Light Blue’s invoicing and other finance features just as you are at the moment because you can use our data export tools to maintain a “digital link” between Light Blue and accountancy software.

As always, if you have any questions or need any help then please get in touch with us via email!

Google are going to be making some changes to their Google Calendar API in the near future. We’ve recently released free updates to both Light Blue 8 and Light Blue 7 that will allow Light Blue to carry on publishing events to your Google Calendar.

If you’re using our Google Calendar publishing feature, please make sure that you’re using Light Blue 8 (any version of Light Blue 8 will do, but it’s always best to use the current version to makes sure you’re benefitting from all of the updates that we’ve been working on) or Light Blue 7.1.8.

We’ve released Light Blue 8.0.3, which is another free update to everyone who subscribes to our online services or has bought Light Blue 8.

You can now use the “Add To Found Set” section of the Records menu to add a Resource to a selection of records, and the “Remove From Found Set” section to remove a Resource from a selection of records.

Our QuickBooks invoice export now includes the invoice due date and the linked shoot’s title and shoot type.

The “Tidy Popup Menus” housekeeping command now allows you to tidy the purchase item Name field.

The background activity window no longer contains an item unhelpfully labelled as “Description” when you first open it.

Updated the printed version of workflows to show email and text message steps correctly.

On Windows, the staff login dialog now focuses the password field when it opens to save you needing to click or tab into it.

Fixed a problem where underscores in contract mail-merge values could appear as \_

Fixed a problem where charts section could fail to take percentage discounts into account.

Fixed a problem with the “Staff Shoots” report that prevented shoots from being included more than once if multiple staff are assigned to it. Enquiries and cancelled shoots are no longer included in the report.

Fixed a bug that could cause macOS contacts to be published to an account other than the default account.

Fixed a database error message that could appear when using the Sales list view with both the Photographer and Salesperson columns.

Fixed extra text that could appear when printing a contact record.

Fixed a bug that could cause an attachment to be duplicated when sending emails in quick succession.

Fixed a printing problem that could cause the rightmost column to be cut off the Purchases section of a tax report.

Fixed a bug that could cause unsaved changes to be lost when dragging an attachment into an email.

Fixed a problem with updating workflows when upgrading from an early Light Blue 8 beta.

Fixed a problem where setting a custom label for a contact method wouldn’t display that custom label until you enter the phone number or email address.

Fixed a couple of unexpected quits that could occur in unusual circumstances.